In the last few decades, fuel delivery methods have undergone extensive improvement especially in terms of management and control software. However the hardware and structure of the fuel injection equipment has generally remained unchanged. The dominant injector design for both GDI and CIDI is characterized by a protracted tip which houses the spray holes through which fuel is discharged into the combustion chamber.
There is a great disparity between the size of the injector tip and the volume of the corresponding combustion chamber. The injector tip is not adequate to efficiently discharge and distribute fuel therein at satisfactory rates. Its preferred that the injection process be completed within a few crank angle degrees. This is especially true during transition from part load to full load. To meet this demand, each spray hole necessarily discharges more fuel (by volume cm3) than what would be ideal. This is the inevitable cause of a host of undesirable effects including long fuel jets, excessive liquid lengths, poor droplet distribution, wall wetting, fuel rich regions, poor surface to volume ratio, incomplete combustion, particulate matter, TOG and ROG etc. Another disadvantage to the injector tip is that due to size limitations, it is difficult to make improvements on fuel injector performance.
A superior way of carrying out chemical reactions is found in a relatively new branch in the chemical engineering industry referred to as Process Intensification (PI). “PI allows highly efficient reaction processes with increased selectivity, intrinsic safety, higher yields of the desired products, short residence times, high mass transfer rates, fewer side reactions hence unwanted products and the ability to consolidate multiple processing steps.
The operations of Mixing, Mass transfer (hence injection and combustion), are improved when intensified. PI enhances these operations by dividing them up into a multiplicity of smaller ones which are evenly spaced and localized and having enough of them to add up to or exceed the throughput of the conventional one.
The combustion chambers of heat engines in prior art may be considered batch reactors, in that a group of reagents (nitrogen, oxygen, fuel, argon, EGR, etc.) are all mixed and allowed to react over a relatively long period in order to produce a functional working fluid. In the whole group of reagents, only oxygen and fuel are intended to react. Even though some of the reagents serve a minor role of dilution, their presence results in undesirable side reactions. One example of such side reactions is that between Oxygen and Nitrogen. Engine efficiency is directly proportional to the differential between combustion temperature and the ambient temperature. But traditionally the combustion temperature has been kept below the Nox formation threshold, which happens to be within the same range as material limits. Consequently the artisan has settled for the current batch type combustion for power generation.